Real-time noise reduction based on ground truth free deep learning for optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a high-resolution non-invasive 3D imaging modality, which has been widely used for biomedical research and clinical studies. The presence of noise on OCT images is inevitable which will cause problems for post-image processing and diagnosis. The frame-averaging technique that acquires multiple OCT images at the same or adjacent locations can enhance the image quality significantly. Both conventional frame averaging methods and deep learning-based methods using averaged frames as ground truth have been reported. However, conventional averaging methods suffer from the limitation of long image acquisition time, while deep learning-based methods require complicated and tedious ground truth label preparation. In this work, we report a deep learning-based noise reduction method that does not require clean images as ground truth for model training. Three network structures, including Unet, super-resolution residual network (SRResNet), and our modified asymmetric convolution-SRResNet (AC-SRResNet), were trained and evaluated using signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), edge preservation index (EPI) and computation time (CT). The effectiveness of these three trained models on OCT images of different samples and different systems was also investigated and confirmed. The SNR improvement for different sample images for L2-loss-trained Unet, SRResNet, and AC-SRResNet are 20.83 dB, 24.88 dB, and 22.19 dB, respectively. The SNR improvement for public images from different system for L1-loss-trained Unet, SRResNet, and AC-SRResNet are 19.36 dB, 20.11 dB, and 22.15 dB, respectively. AC-SRResNet and SRResNet demonstrate better denoising effect than Unet with longer computation time. AC-SRResNet demonstrates better edge preservation capability than SRResNet while Unet is close to AC-SRResNet. Eventually, we incorporated Unet, SRResNet, and AC-SRResNet into our graphic processing unit accelerated OCT imaging system for online noise reduction evaluation. Real-time noise reduction for OCT images with size of 512×512 pixels for Unet, SRResNet, and AC-SRResNet at 64 fps, 19 fps, and 17 fps were achieved respectively.